A place for Sharepoint and rantings
Archive for April, 2007
The price you pay for early adoption
Apr 23rd
I knew the price of the R88 would drop but not as soon as it has done. The price of the R88 37″ has dropped from the launch price I paid of £850 to £750. A hundred quid would have been nice in my pocket.
Also the Price of the M86 40″ is not as high as I expected and is £1,161. Now that’s £300 more than I paid (£400 at the new price) I still think I made the right choice, the smaller screen (for my lounge size) and lack of a broadcast 1080p content make it the right choice, but hmmmmmmmm.
Bugger. (That would have paid for the tramampoline).
Tramampoline !
Apr 22nd
I am just a big kid, Sue wanted me to get a trampoline for the summer, keep Jarreth from going on about Xbox (cos he ain’t playing except for weekends). I grudgingly agreed but deep in side a little voice was doing a Homer and shouting “Tramampoline! tramampoline!”.
It’s really great we have had loads of fun on it already. It’s has 10ft diameter and that’s quite big, certainly big for my garden and it came with a safety net and weather cover all for the lovely price of £150. I managed to assemble it myself in about 1.5 hours, it was easy, and within another half an hour I managed to hurt myself.
Today I ache. My legs my arms my back is killing, one thing you don’t get with it is ibuprofen. Even Sue had a go and kind of enjoyed it, which is a big deal considering she came close to losing her tongue when she nearly bit it off in a trampolining accident in school. Much of our tutelage to Jarreth in the art of trampolining involved telling him to shut his mouth when he’s bouncing.
Still I cannot recommend it enough we got it from “Tim More >
Woo and how Tesla is turning in his grave
Apr 20th
I recently found this blog post and it is brilliant. You could not find a better description of the kind of crap* that this site peddles than in this posting.
Ohh I’m feeling all negative best go buy one of these.
* Obviously “Crap” is a subjective title for these goods, feel free to peruse and make your own decisions about… no no no no no its crap.
Samsung R88 Remote Codes
Apr 18th
After having the TV a while I wanted to get certain things working, as I have SKY+ I wanted to turn it on and off and do the volume at least.
None of the 3 digit codes for the SKY remote worked so I phoned and came up with the 4 digit manufacture code which worked. Its 0646.
I wanted my Samsung remote to control other devices. Like the Sky+ box. I can’t get that working and Samsung’s UK support like suck like a dyson plugged into a 110 supply and told me this was Sky’s problem. Sky were incredulous that it was their problem that Samsung’s remote did not have the code for a sky box, sky said we provide control for devices with our remote and that’s our business. Samsung put responsibility for the Sky remote and the Samsung remote in the hands of sky. If anyone does know the code for control of a Sky+ machine with a Sammy remote let me know.
However I also have a really cheap Asda DVD player, my lovely Panny broke, but it was old. This is a Pacific dvd player and its code on the Samsung remote control is 055, and yes I More >
Hmm not impressed – whoops
Apr 7th
My Samsung 37″ R88.
So I set it up and plugged in Sky and the Xbox and the DVD player (no HD or PC yet).
From the moment I turned it on my wife was ooooh and arrr thats fantastic. It’s so clear and crisp (this was just SD). It’s a bit blurry I thought, this isn’t anywhere near as good as I hoped.
So I thought I’d better try some HD content. Step in “Pirates 2″ clip on downloaded on the xbox 360.
“Oh my god, that’s utterly amazing, we need a HD-DVD player now” says the wife (I love having a geeky wife).
“It still looks a bit blurry to me the edges on the text are not well defined”. I say.
“Put your bloody glasses on then you dick” says the wife (never was subtle).
Whoops.
It’s as amazing as she said. Its better than I could have expected. I have been watching an old Toshiba 40″ rear projector. Blacks and greys all run into each other, in fact unless your watching at night there is no such thing as a black on this old TV. You could not watch this TV in bright sunlight without drawing the curtains.
The Samsung R88 with its 8000:1 More >
Kids Tv or Damn SKY
Apr 6th
I think kids TV is getting a bit to realistic, take a look at this explanation of what this weeks episode of Lazy Town is about.
Now I wouldn’t normally mind errors on the EPG but when your with Sky+ they CHARGE you for the EPG, and its never bloody right, it can’t handle doing things when two recordings are happening, EVER HEARD OF DISK CACHE you useless morons.
The sooner I can wean my son off Sky the better. Media centre PC coming soon to replace Sky’s useless half baked PVR solution.
Technorati tags: Sky EPG
I Hate SAP
Apr 5th
There are somethings you get so used to in visual studio that they become second nature, they are part of your programming experience. Take for example the tooltips when typing a method or function, you know the one, it shows all the parameters and their types.
Now imagine that you don’t have that any more. You just have some crappy “pattern” button where you can type in the method name and it inserts the method signature complete with blanks for you to fill in.
Then you still have to dip into the method code or help (if there is any such help) to figure out what types the parameters you are using are.
Undoubtedly SAP platform is very powerful and has a language built for helping customize and take advantage of your platform. But the tools, the tools your given and the documentation really, really, suck.
I one day hope that the MS/SAP interoperaility project goes so far as to have a ABAP plugin for visual studio, complete with MSDN style documentation.
I can dream.
Technorati tags: sap blogger
AJAX Vunerablilities
Apr 3rd
Its easy to say but I guess we already new that Certain AJAX techniques were vunerable to attack. I mean I even published an article on bypassing the “same origin policy” see WebParts and Ajax I refer to the sites that use this bypass technique, hell I even call it a security by-pass and there’s your biggest clue.
This document talks about the various techniques in trying to prevent this and comes down hard on JSON. I haven’t had chance to explore this, I reckon with a lot of jiggery pokery it might be possible to get xml data as well, depends on how that data is retrieved, the document suggests means in which bad script could try to circumvent certain security tactics in json, those same techniques could work for xml data I reckon.
But take a look the bits about session cookies sound good.
Samsung
Apr 2nd
I’m about to buy a new TV. In fact just seven days ago I stopped myself from clicking the go to checkout button and have, for some reason I’m not sure of myself, been fighting the urge all week.
You see I had made my decision, I had researched and agonised and fretted about the cost for quite a few months. I had flip-flopped between the R74 and the N73 models, I had completely discounted the F71 no built in freeview plus other issues (same issues that the others have but they are not as expensive) and settled on the N73.
So this Saturday I was looking at TV’s with my mate Steve, he had decided on the R74, he wanted a 37″ but couldn’t find one online with a site he trusted so we decided to check Currys web site. I searched for Samsung 37″ and much to my suprise got one entry. “What the !?!?” I thought, never heard of this, a R88.
Oh o, thats new, thats very new.
Samsung have just released a completly new range of LCD’s and they look like they kick ass. Reading the avforums some people have said that the M87 (top of the line) has solved More >